August, 2018
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What You Make
This weekend I ran several sessions of play tests for Cold Start.
I’m not a vendor at GenCon, so when people ask me “What did you make so far this weekend” I tell them “I didn’t make any money”. A lot of the time they follow up with a sympathetic “I’m sorry”, but I laugh and explain the things I did make this weekend:
- I made about 100 new friends.
- I made tons of corny jokes.
- I made a player really happy by using their character’s preferred pronouns consistently without making a mistake. “That almost never happens,” they told me.
- I made a shy, nonconfrontational player feel empowered through the use of a highly social character who could end fights without throwing a punch.
- I made people laugh with my corny jokes.
- I made a character at the next table jealous: he told me he wished he could join my game, only to have him show up at the next session with generic tickets.
- I made 4 separate adventures that touched on societal problems and started interesting discussions about philosophical concepts like self-identity and the source of law.
In short: I made a little bit more happiness. Just a little.
Maybe I’ll be a vendor next year and maybe I’ll make money. But that wasn’t the goal this year. Instead, this year I made a lot of good things happen. Seems like a win to me.